Posts Tagged «xbox»

After an 11-month run at the top of the sales charts, the Xbox One finally outsold the PS4 in November in the US and UK. In the US alone, Xbox One sales totaled an impressive 1.2 million units in November. Is this a sign that a turnaround is on the books — did the library of Xbox One games hit critical mass? — or is it just the predictable result of the deep discounts that Microsoft has been pushing for the last couple of months?

There might be life in the old beast yet: Microsoft now accepts Bitcoin as a payment option on its Windows and Xbox stores — which means you can now use Bitcoin to purchase a new copy of Windows, the latest installment of Call of Destiny: Master Chief Edition, or even to buy the latest season of your favorite TV show. Obviously, this is a pretty big deal for Bitcoin, and it will be seen as a significant milestone that might get other big companies to take another look at accepting Bitcoin.

In a rather chilling case of dystopian sci-fi made real, some Canadians have created a modified Xbox gamepad that draws blood from your arm every time your in-game character takes damage. While this is ostensibly a rather noble effort, it’s hard not to see this as the first step towards extreme gaming and e-sports where losers actually die in real life.

Microsoft has announced that it will acquire the Minecraft franchise, and its Swedish developer Mojang, for $2.5 billion. Microsoft asserts that it ‘plans’ to continue distributing Minecraft across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, iOS, and Android, but obviously the game’s cross-platform future is called into question by this acquisition. Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, and Mojang’s other two founders, will not be staying with Mojang/Microsoft and will “move on to start new projects.”

If you were wondering what kind of graphics we can expect from true next-gen games on the Xbox One, PS4, and PC, feast your eyes on the visual wizardry of French artist Koola. Do not adjust your screen: All of the images and videos that you see in this story were generated in real-time using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), at decent frame rates (~30-60 fps) on a mid-range gaming PC.

At its Siggraph 2014 booth, Intel is showing off one of the first public demos of DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 — and the improvement over older graphics APIs, such as DirectX 11, is really quite startling. The exact same demo under DirectX 12 consumed 50% less power than the DirectX 11 version. In a similar demo, the higher efficiency and lower overheads of DX12 allowed for a 60% increase in frame rate over DX11 while consuming the same amount of power. After an awful lot of talk about the benefits of Mantle, DirectX 12, and OpenGL NG, it’s very exciting to see an example of the actual real-world gains of these new graphics APIs.

At Gamescom in Germany, Sony has announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold over 10 million units since it launched nine months ago in November 2013. Meanwhile, Microsoft still hasn’t released any recent sales figures for the Xbox One, suggesting the console isn’t doing all that well. Our estimates put the Xbox One at around 5 million units sold through to customers — or about half the total sales of the PS4. According to a fateful quote by ex-Xbox chief Don Mattrick, it would appear that the PS4 has won this generation’s console war.

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